


The Hero Does Not Win in This Timeline

by lucymordy



Category: Poptropica (Video Game)
Genre: Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 18:23:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15515850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymordy/pseuds/lucymordy
Summary: Small scraps of the Binary Bard.





	The Hero Does Not Win in This Timeline

**Author's Note:**

> hello, it's lucy again, writing about mordred, thanks for checking this out!

The Hero does not win in this timeline.

—

It is something like magic. But, he doesn’t believe it's just that. Anything else, from a scientific perspective, it is anything else. Perhaps energy. Perhaps simple waves. But, it had kept the technology aloft in the sea of Arcturus, like a ship on the choppy ocean of a kingdom.

—

The girl is the least endangered person in this timeline, just a bartering chip of a princess. She, caged and glowing green and utterly asleep, simply curls there on the platform like something infantile, not knowing a bit about anything other than that she is _elsewhere_.

—

He investigated the cottage in the field, abandoned with autumn sunset light streaming from gaps in the rafters. He investigated it just as he saw the bird nestled in the roots of a lone tree. Good as dead. However, not yet dead when he checked. He took the bird like a babe in his arms and returned home.

—

In perceptive days— this dimension being far behind and difficult to measure compared to earth, his ex of a home— it had been about two weeks before he returned. Ten earth years, give or take a few months, had passed in just those two weeks he had been left to simmer. He sprung his plan.

—

If this were a successful timeline, it would take a perceptive day in his time for The Hero to thwart him, easy as cherry pie, with the help of a few knights.

—

His kneecaps shattered on the bedrock when they threw him to the place beneath the library. Through excruciating pain, he dragged himself with elbows back and forth until they ached to the growing hole in the wall and the place where they gave him food. He finally tunneled his way to an area he knew was safe.

—

He will never marry anyone, the princess included. King of the Universe. That’s what he is, after he took and took and took from Arcturus after being denied and denied and denied by the king. King of the Universe, something he had imagined as a child before realizing that science and monarchy do not mix, and DNA has a price.

—

Mordred can’t laugh any longer with lungs of steel.

—

That elsewhere feeling stirring in her gut, even as she does not. Nor dream, nor breathe, not without his orb sustaining her in this coma.

—

 _That’s a mighty lot of introspection you’re having there, Mor, isn’t it? Pity? Who can you pray to with metal knees that sometimes invert into a deer’s? Or cry with a blisteringly red eye down a plated face? Is there still burnt skin under there? Burnt to a crisp? From the way you came? With that hole in your gut the size of a fist? It took you down. Oh_ boy _did it take you down._

—

It hurt so bad he thought he’d died the second he opened his remaining eye and bled buckets onto the floor of the spaceship. He’d rather have died in that moment. But, in this timeline, he did not— he lived on, perhaps not as human, but as a machine man.

—

It was true. The princess would have given anything to be taken, as is evident to The Hero by the notes she left behind and the society beneath the fountain, where a slab of marble had been carved in his likeness. In one timeline, The Hero had been down there, in another, they hadn’t.

—

“Merlin,” he spoke, voice crackling, legs dragging behind him, as he reached the secret hideaway for emergencies only, “Merlin, are you here?”

One hoot, one beautiful hoot, in response to his name being called, split the air in the chamber.

He could sob.

—

He fashioned himself out of scrap metal from the ship like a ragdoll, and he hated every agonizing moment of the process. It was all a part of his research, he tried to tell himself, and he was saving the dying, as he did with every experiment.

But was he really alive anymore?

—

_Oh Mor, oh poor, poor cyborg bard, you’d think you would have learned by now not to pull the strings like this. Think some more about what you’ve done._

_But, that isn’t in this timeline, is it?_


End file.
